Camping with a Pi

[Abmvk]

Inspiration needed

I have a spare 4B, and a caravan. My wife and I like to go for long weekends, where I work on friday in the caravan for my office, and then two days of real vacation-feeling. So, I am thinking there should be a way to make the spare 4B useful somehow. When camping we always try to have wifi at the camping site, but at least I have my phone with 5/4G to provide for internet access.

I am *really* not handy with electronics, plugging in a camera or using a HAT is about the best I can do. I am also not very handy with Python, but I can manage with C and a bit Rust. But my real problem here is lack of creative ideas. So, any suggestions would be appreciated.

[terribleted]

We camp in a 5th wheel for months at a time. It has a TV, so i use a 12V inverter to power the pi and the TV (use the inverter when no AC is available). Wireless to my phone. works great, as long as the inverter is big enough. no special circuits needed.

[thagrol]

There's lots of potential ways to make use of the spare 4B. Here's a copuple to get you started:

• Media player
• Retro gaming box
• If you're up for a challenge use it to monitor battery levesl, gas bottle levels, water tank levels, ...

As for powering the Pi, if you have a mains hookup, use the official PSU. If you only have a (nominal) 12v supply use a suitablke buck converter to get 5v from it.

[easterly_gales]

Inspiration needed

I have a spare 4B, and a caravan. My wife and I like to go for long weekends, where I work on friday in the caravan for my office, and then two days of real vacation-feeling. So, I am thinking there should be a way to make the spare 4B useful somehow. .....t at least I have my phone with 5/4G to provide for internet access.

my real problem here is lack of creative ideas.

Just FYI, 4g over mobile phone I have very frequently used and compared in speeds.
For caravans with 12/24V DC power it's far superior with the CM4, because you can power it direct off 12-24V.

Using a mix of special Mirotik - like routers compared with Smartphone access, and then comparing with the CM4 + LTE/Sim/Tofu, came up with some fairly rude conclusions.
Smartphones could get to about 10mb/s DOWN, but exhibited pretty awful uplink behaviour. (as low as 350kb/s).
We tried a number of different smartphones and they all gave similar behaviour, which meant having a reliable mobile video conf over Skype became impossible, and of course have no ethernet ports.

The mikrotik style routers (Router OS and wifi access points as well as wired Gb ethernet) - ours come from microdrive in Russia - a credit card sized router board...
These gave good service and could be equipped with decent external antennae+they run off car or truck power up to 36V.
Over wifi it became clear the wifi overhead means the maximum speeds bi-directional tend to be 10-18mb/s MAX (on theoretical 54mb/s).
Testing using wired ethernet gave a very useful extra 20-30% more.

Lastly the TOFU - style solution on a CM4 which has the SIM plug into the board and a M.2 modem device attached to the motherboard, and has tiny little cables to go to external antennae. It also runs from 9-36V no worry.

This gave us the best performance, which frequently could be seen hitting in 20-25mb/s range and an uplink often in the 12-15mb/s range.
FYI, this is why I chose this as our optimal mobile router system since I got it going last december, running 24/7 and has so far totalled up this year a staggering amount of data.
3.89TB down, and 50.2GB UP.